61% women garment workers cannot take call on how to spend their income independently, survey

Women workers are the mainstay of the workforce that propels the apparel manufacturing sector of Bangladesh.

However, irrespective of the representation in the workforce, they don’t seem to have much of a say as to how’d they want to spend their income, so underlines a recent survey.

According to a joint survey carried out amongst 10,367 workers employed in various manufacturing units in the prominent manufacturing hubs of Saver, Gazipur, Chittagong, Narayanganj and Dhaka by Microfinance Opportunities (MFO) and South Asian Network on Economic Modeling (SANEM) – SANEM is a non-profit research organisation and a network of economists and policy makers with a special emphasis on economic modelling – a massive 61 per cent of women workers reportedly have no control over their own income with only 39 per cent of female workers reportedly having freedom on deciding how they’d like to spend their monthly income.

Further, the survey also found that compared to their male counterparts, women workers have lesser scope of making other financial decisions in the family and have to consult other family members in majority of such cases.